Friday, November 11, 2005

I wanted to briefly mention two very different games that I’ve been spending time with recently. The first is Guitar Hero by Harmonix and the second is Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space by Digital Eel. Neither is a traditional game, and both have some good lessons about game design to share.Guitar Hero: The Importance of SettingGuitar Hero is a rhythm game at its core. The abstracted game mechanics are little different than DDR or the dozens of other titles that have come before. Yet this is one helluva amazing title. I just watched my friend rip through a couple of sets and I’m completely pumped. Adrenaline, air guitar…my lady keeps looking at me with a bemused look when I break out into “More than a feeeeling. Baawah, bam, bam”

Deep down in the core of your being, you know Boston rules. And what about Black Sabbath playing Iron Man? I grew up listening to such music and I suspect a lot of folks did as well. These songs resonate.

And this is the genius of the title from a game design perspective. The risk / rewards schedule are driven by more than just abstract tokens. When you hit a wrong note, you are letting down your audience. When you hit a note and the crowd cheers, you are experiencing a microscopic moment of rock stardom. This is an experience you’ve been wanting for years. The psychological reward of hitting a correct key is multiplied by every time that you’ve air guitared in your bedroom (with the door shut) or sung the words to your favorite rock song.

The controller completes the psychological bridge. It is a guitar in the mind of the player. The immersiveness of the basic verbs – playing cords, wailing on the whammy bar – is accentuated by the player’s ability to carry a familiar object, and holding a familiar stance. This is a game controller loaded with cultural meaning. We’ve talked before about the ‘juiciness’ of low level risk / reward schedules. The controller turns a mechanical experience, “pressing a button” into a tactile experience with strong emotional connotations, “playing my favorite power chord.”

The star power activation method is ingenious. You tilt the guitar straight up, rock star style. Give that designer a raise.

When you tie into real world desires, you strengthen the power of your risk / reward schedules dramatically. Guitar Hero is an addictive game, far more than its Simon-style mechanics suggest. The title fills a real psychological need and that gives the design impressive power over its audience

Potential to tap into the non-gamer marketI love the audience profile on this one too:

If you’ve ever taken guitar lessons

If you’ve ever air guitared to a rock song

Doesn’t matter one lick if you are a gamer or have never touched a game console in your life.

This market has approximately zero competition in the US and is huge. A title such as this is the equivalent of inventing karaoke (Yes, I’m aware of Guitar Freaks…doesn’t count since the ever-so-critical setting isn’t American enough). Given the proper marketing, this is the sort of the title that could spark a crazy cultural fad.

Yet, I had to call around just to find a box. Dumping a title with such broad appeal in game stores is not the path to rock star level success. My thought? Harmonix should get Nintendo on the phone right away, sign up for the Revolution and get on their marketing schedule ASAP. Get a publisher behind this who knows how to sell to non-gamers.

Weird Worlds: The Benefits of Randomly Generated WorldsWeird Worlds is the sequel to one of my favorite indie games of all time, the wonderful Strange Adventures in Infinite Space by Digital Eel. I have to wait until I’m in my new home before I can order one of the antiquated CDs from their new publisher, but I managed to snag a Weird Worlds demo.

The core game design is roughly the same with a coat of new graphics and new user interface and lots of new content. The interface could use a bit of polishing, but the game play here is the key.

First, this is a very small team. I count three main people with the sequel seeming to have a few extra folks helping out part time. They’ve managed to create a highly addictive single player experience that evokes a strong adventure feel without spending massive amount of money on content, cut scenes or elaborately scripted set pieces.

ROI of Randomly Generated MapsInstead, the player travels about a randomly generated map. I’m sure balancing was a complete pain, but the end result is a nearly infinite number of short adventures. Others have tried this style of game play, but SAIS and Weird World have managed to produce something that is addictive and has surprisingly long term appeal. Even after playing SAIS for months, I’ve yet to burn out on the title.

There’s an ROI that comes from randomly generated worlds that is very impressive. Content costs for static levels increase in a linear fashion. Every level you add costs roughly the same as rest. Randomly generated levels have a higher up front cost. You need to create the map generation algorithm, develop the various classes of objects and create balancing metrics for those object classes. A simple static level might take a day or two to throw together, where a competent random map generator might take two or three months.

However, after the initial investment, the random map generator is insanely efficient. New objects can be added in an iterative fashion. Major balance changes to the entire game can be made nearly instantly. What you lose in your initial investment, you gain back a hundred fold in flexibility and the ability to provide your players with lots of content.

Also, static levels have their own hidden costs. As you add new tokens to your game, the cost of building a level increases. Later levels will often take substantially longer to polish than initial test levels. Randomly generated maps don’t have this issue. You only have to pay the cost of creating the token. There is little additional level creation cost since it is an automated process.

Benefits of automated buildsThe phrase, “automated build process” excites me more than you can possibly imagine. Games initially were about software development. Over time, they have turned into a production heavy activity with the vast majority of effort being spent on waterfall-style Disney-esque content creation. Production heavy endeavors tend to have a lot of momentum and be difficult to change. Project managers have a tendency to minimize changes to high risk items such as core game mechanics in order to preserve the heavy investment in existing content.

When you start making your game development more like software development and less like production work, you can more easily take advantage of agile development processes. Core game mechanics can shift more fluidly if you aren’t weighed down by the thought of breaking a hundred handcrafted levels. There is nothing worse than changing the jump distance on your character and ruining multiple man years of labor because your character can no longer successfully navigate the lovingly handcrafted map files. With content being ‘built on the fly’, such a change is trivial.

Fluid core game mechanics means more low risk opportunities to polish those game mechanics. You can iterate on original mechanics more freely and ideally create games that are more psychological addictive. If the game play is what matters, build your game using a process that gives you the freedom to make changes to your game play at a low cost.

You’ll see the term algorithmically generated content tossed around. The money men focus on the cost savings over static content. That is a good benefit. The ultimate benefit however is the unique ability to inexpensively polish the game play of your new designs. Think of it as a critical building block in the practile of agile game design.

Turn-based: Fits into your lifeThe other aspect of Weird World that is exciting is this is a turn-based title. A busy player can stop it at any point with no worries about dying or losing their path. Life for many is a series of constant interruptions and games that fit into a multitasking environment occupy a useful niche.I’d love to see this concept expand out into a setting with a bit more appeal. Space is great, but it is somewhat abstract and can alienate the more casual, female gamers (though there are more women sci-fi fans than men these days). Would a treasure hunting, exploration game be more popular with the casual audience? What about an urban shopping title? It would be interesting to take this great game design in additional directions.

ConclusionThese are two very different games with two powerful lessons. If you haven’t checked them out, you need to.

I can’t help thinking about combining the two. What if you had algorithmically generated game with a setting the resonated with a strong customer need? I’m not sure what that might be, but it certainly is a fun design exercise to contemplate. :-)

Thursday, November 10, 2005

The raw desolation of an empty Midwestern strip mall in the waning hours of the noon embodies the essence of the American suburbanite’s desperate existence. Outside the sun beats down on the endless empty parking lots, baking the soul out of both plants and people. Personality is eradicated. The neighborhood shops are generic big box chains. Another Walgreens. Another Pottery Barn. Another Kwiki Lube.

This is not a landscape meant for people. You can’t even walk from one store to the next. Instead, you get in your car, drive through a convoluted artery of dead pavement and cracked concrete and get out at your next capitalistic theme park destination. A sign blares at you “Yes, we have Mickey Mouse salt shakers! 50% off!”You are not a human being to these stores. True fact: in suburbia, they model the cashiers’ stations after the queues used by the cattle industry. I’ve run the equations and calculated the break even point for adding another point of human contact. You are a source of income whose needs must be served to the minimum degree necessary for you to open your wallet.

Mile upon mile, the stores stretch in every direction. They speak a simple message, “You are here to be used. You’ll enjoy it because you know no better.” Wide eight lane streets with mini exits for Target and Walmart are packed with heavily armored SUV’s. In Middle America, it never was about community or being ecologically friendly. It has always been about surviving in a psychologically hostile wasteland.

Welcome to Big Business’s vision of the American Dream.

Recently, I was in the odd situation of having a spare hour to relax. As I drove around in circles for a good twenty minutes, it occurred to me that there is not a single location was built for satisfying this simple, basic human need. I could have headed off to the nearest King Soopers (a grocery store chain that demonstrates American’s rebellion against the most basic forums of intellectualism), but what good would that do me? Should I hang about in front of the mini-bank while I read a paper?

Finally I spotted a Starbucks and felt a wave of relief. Here was a place that I could catch a quick drink and doodle in my notebook for a short while.

As a snob and a humanist, Starbucks represents to me a derivative mockery of real culture. At some point in the past, there was a simple coffee shop with a community of patrons. The owner made the coffee. Rich aroma filled the air and comfortable jokes about the weather or the latest news were lazily exchanged. Little tables welcomed you to hang out for a moment and may even think a deep thought or two. Starbucks took that atmosphere, upped the caffeine, commercialized it, productized it, and turned it into a $1.5 billion a year business that is growing at 22% annually.

But it occurred to me as I sat at a table surrounded by the now iconic brown and green interior: “This is the best most people have.”

No wonder it is popular.

take careDanc.

PS: This one is for Ray and Zoombapup. Zoombapup wanted to see me rant. Ray, well...I just like talking with Ray about the midwest. :-)

Monday, November 7, 2005

I’m sitting here in plaid bathrobe, drinking tea in my nearly empty house. Just imagine a somewhat scruffy Arthur Dent and you’ll get the picture. Due to a rather poorly timed illness, my move out to Seattle having been delayed by a week. I’m left with Civ IV, a web browser and handful of new home loan applications. Yes, I am a dangerous man for the next five days.Track backsLostgarden.com has been mentioned on several sites that I frequent rather regularly. If you haven’t stopped by, check them out.

games.slashdot.org: I feel like I’m starting to be a regular over there. Luckily with the new bandwidth package, my site no longer goes down at the smallest mention.

Raph Koster: I rather envy the turbulent, but fascinating experience he must be experiencing over at SOE. The rules shift that is happening with SWG is a precursor to the virtual Revolutions of our modern time…major shifts in governmental policy followed by violent public outbursts. These transitions have occurs hundreds of thousands of times throughout human history. Their scale and significance is only increasing in the online worlds we build. Luckily, most players aren’t French and only rant on forums.

The Long Tail: If you aren’t familiar with the long tail concept, head over and check it out. It is one of those brilliant ideas that are remarkably difficult to build out in practice. All I can say to the casual games folks who live by it is that portals are the new retail storefronts.

DROD: I also wanted to put a yell out to Erik who does some fine work on a title puzzle/dungeon crawl indie title called DROD. He’s experimenting with some of the market concepts I mentioned in my Learning from Touring Bands article. He has a dedicated community with a large focus on user created content and an interesting ‘massively single player’ system of building community. Good stuff.

Essays I have approximately a half dozen essays in various states of disrepair. I know a blog is supposed to be impromptu and exciting, but I’ve come to realize that my rough drafts are considerably rougher than what most people consider comprehensible. A few that come to mind include:

Designing an Advergame: Some thoughts that go into design a game as an advertisement.

From Donkey Kong to Mario 64: The process of extending a prototype core game mechanic into modern title. This will not be about Nintendo products in case anyone was wondering.

The stage gate product design process applied to game design: (Warning, this one is likely to turn into a book at some point. :-)

If any of these sound exciting, drop me a note and it may give me enough mental energy to finish them off.

I’ve been getting some nice feedback from folks at Austin Games and Serious Games Summit. Overall the comments are “Good, long articles that deal with subjects in-depth. Did I mention long?” I worry that I may be causing eyestrain.

Random disappointments I have been waiting in intense (perhaps even frothing) anticipation for the release of the destined-to-be-great Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space from the heroic folks at Digital Eel. Unfortunately, it is currently only available on CD and not for direct download. Since I’m in the middle of a move, encountering such a retro distribution scheme puts a crimp in my plans.

It is strange how rapidly I’ve come to depend on electronic downloads. The games stay safely on my hard drive, my backup software manages all the save files just like any other bit of data. There’s no physical clutter to worry about and most of the time I end up giving more money to the actual developer instead of the inevitable middle men.

So it is with a distinct sense of melancholy that I slip the CD of Civ IV into my CD drive and dream wistfully of a time when games finally leave the physical world behind. Oh, to have WW:RIS downloading in the background at this very moment.

Sigh.

Gameface newsI’m still keeping tabs on Anark Gameface and heard recently that they had just uploaded the October release. Anark Gameface, for those of you who haven’t checked it out yet is a solution for building game user interfaces, a traditionally dreary and thankless task. If you haven’t had the pleasure, building a UI is far worse than it sounds.

The sweet part about it is Anark Studio, the authoring tool. Basically, the artist gets to build the UI using a tool they love and the programmer just needs to hook up a basic kernel to the game engine. Then they get to wander off and do more important stuff (like not be the artist’s bare chested man slave)

I’ve been meaning to write up an article on the economics of art tool development. Suffice it to say that no development team’s internal tools will ever get to the level of polish that you’ll find in a dedicated tool like Anark Studio. Artists are too damned picky and you’ve got a game to build.

The new version has some lovely Lua-based scripting and well as a set of drag-and-drop interface components. Right now, it is best suited for console titles and there are some great titles in the works using it for the PS3, Xbox 360 and others. If you are building a front end or even an in-game UI, this is the way your process should work.

Empower the artists using powerful, highly productive, easy-to-use tools. That is a game development mantra worth repeating for the next decade or two.

Folks in general completely missed the point of the last little post on the culture of the game design community. I want to particularly thank Zoombapup and the other great commentators who pushed me to clarify. Kudos to Gamasutra and Elias for getting the gist of the article.

The post wasn’t about lambasting programmer-designers. It was about pointing out a strong blind spot in our culture and practices. Instead what we got was a stream of prerecorded comments that were triggered by the words “programmer” and “designer” being on the same page.

I touched a nerve, but unfortunately it wasn’t one that I was writing about. :-) It is like telling your grandparents that smoking kills and they spend the next few hours arguing about whether menthol or regular is the better flavor.

Take twoLet’s take a different look at the original issue. The premise is this: The game industry is a highly interdependent ecosystem that is the natural consequence of historical starting conditions. It is not however the only form that a game development culture can take. It is almost certainly not the most profitable form.

We need take a step back and introduce some systems thinking to understand the dynamics of the industry. If we blame the publishers or the programmers or the consumers or the designers as individuals, we gain little understanding of the issue and manage to create a lot of denial, hand wringing and hurt feelings. The truth is that most individual actors in our industry are doing what they think is best. The result may be a degenerate system, but the individuals are operating with a clean conscience. There is absolutely no paradox here.

Ultimately, I’m not concerned by individuals doing their jobs poorly. My concern is that they are fixating on an insignificantly tiny market when a much larger one awaits. By blindly devoting their efforts toward the current market, we starve the market expansion process.Everyone is doing a great jobFirst, let me assure everyone that they are doing their best. Let’s run through the list.

Publishers are being impressive optimizers: They exist to take successful products and built upon their success. This results in great profits. Who could blame them?

Developers learn from the best games: Most game developers are absolute experts at the various game genres. They know what they personally like and they use this creative vision to improve upon their past game play experiences. Who could blame them?

Programmer designers were just having fun: Of course, all those original designs come from programmer-designers that were building games for themselves. Can you blame them for their personal preferences? Heck, they started the industry. Throwing stones at geniuses like Yu Suzuki is like beating up on Jesus.

The customer want more of what they like: Two kids walk into a store and ask for candy. The guy at the counter only has sour candy. One kid loves it and the other one doesn’t. The kid with the sour tooth comes back the next day and asks for more. Heck, he even invites comes of his friends that also like sour things. The statistics? 100% of children who purchase candy love sour candy. Can you blame them?

The result across the board is a classic self-selection bias on the part of developers, the customers and publishers. Everyone is doing a great job, but the system that results has issues.

I like current gamesYou end up with a market that eats its own tail. We’ve seen this before in the comic book industry and the same pattern reoccurs in many other industries. I’m reminded of Garret Hardin’s essay, The Tragedy of the Commons where Hardin describes the process as “the remorseless working of things.”

The game development community is limited to people who like existing games. The skills, the extracurricular interests, and the passion necessary to build new genres for different audiences rarely exist. In fact, the community actively rejects those who do not fit a rather narrow hardcore mold. We’ve all seen the insidious hiring phrase “Must have a passion for video games.”

The population of existing genres is derived from a very small genetic base. This base was historically built by programmer-designers for people who have tastes that are similar. The 8 or 9 dominant genres are the sour candy that the industry is built upon. The thought that different types of games might bring in new customers is typically brought up by fringe elements only.

The publishers optimize what is available. The publishers look at the limited set of existing options, cut out the least profitable ones and start building efficiencies of scale into the creative and marketing operations. Considering you didn’t have much to start with, you aren’t left with much variety. It is the equivalent of practicing eugenics when you start out with a population of only 4 or 5 healthy animals.

The audience self selects based off the products being offered. People who like the limited population of games buy them. When publishers offer better versions of the same basic software product, the customers buy more. In the process of focusing a limited audience, the industry systematically alienates large swaths of the population.

Occasionally, game developers get a chance to expand the industry. I was just chatting to a friend who worked on a title targeted at pre-teen girls based off a highly popular brand. The designer on the project could have made almost anything and the right design might have turned into a billion dollar franchise.

What he created was a Zelda clone. He also ‘innovated’ by adding insanely difficult jumping puzzles because everyone knows that is how all the cool platform games work. I got stuck completing the tutorial and can’t even imagine what an 11-year old who barely knows their way around a game controller would think of it. By follow his gamer heart, the designer royally screwed up a great opportunity.

No one is to blame. Everyone was doing their job remarkably well. Games for gamers, by gamers. It seems like heaven.

All of this is perfectly fine and results in a small core audience that is well served. If you liked Halo 1 and 2, I have some really exciting news for you about an upcoming Microsoft blockbuster. (I’ll give you a hint. It ends in a ‘3’.) If you want to make product that predominantly serves young, white, introverted, analytical men, I’m certainly not going to stop you.

What about the money?My problem is that I think a lot about money, profitability and competition. Yes, I am a greedy bastard. Let’s run a few numbers. The current ‘active’ population of US households that own one or more consoles is around 35 million. This is different than number of consoles sold and represents the current addressable market in the US.

Now 35 million is much less than the 300 million potential customers. For a consumer electronics device, it is also far less than the 500 million PC’s in service. It is even less than the over 200 million have cable TV in the US alone. It is less than the 200 million cell phones used world wide.

It is okay to be small since we are growing rapidly, right? Unfortunately, no. We are currently growing at around 7.3% a year with much of this arguably driven by population growth not market expansion. It’s a far cry from the 15-20% you hope to see in a thriving high growth industry. For example, that little cell phone market that is 4X larger than the game market? It is growing at a reasonable 19.1% a year.

Also, when you have hundreds of companies targeting the same 35 million person audience, the result is considerable competition. We do not even end up with is eight or nine media categories like you might find in music or movies. With genre king dynamics, we end up with eight or nine software categories. People buy games closer to the way that they purchase copies of word processor or tax software. They don’t need 20 FPS any more than they need 20 copies of Word. Being a first mover on a new genre that serves a new need is like being the first company to master the sale of photo editing software. Big opportunity, low competition.

So, our great population of gamers is really a tiny insignificant fly speck if you look outside our insular little community. We fool ourselves into thinking the industry has ‘made it’ because the few gamers we’ve hooked spend a large amount of money. We even have splashy events on MTV. Sorry.

“If the tribe gathers roots and follows tradition, it will survive” The crazy thing is that so few people in the industry are publicly discussing these very simple numbers. Whether we are talking about the economics of publishers and their portfolio models, or we are discussing about the limitations of programmer-designers, a major element driving the dynamics of the industry is this massive historical and cultural blind spot. We act like a rapidly maturing industry.

We really don’t see all those other people out there. They aren’t gamers so they don’t count. Maybe this is what young men do. They create a self-contained community that values homogenous personality traits and excludes people who are different. That is great if you are attempting to build a fraternity. From an objective business perspective, however, we need to look outward.

One simple strategy on a golden platterI’m an optimist. I see this as an opportunity.

There are lots of folks out there that don’t currently play games that could play games.

If we could get out of our cultural rut and design games that appealed to them, we could make money.

If you don’t, someone else willI’d like to say I came up with such a brilliant strategy, but of course I didn’t. We’ve seen it executed with impressive success on titles like Sims, Nintendogs and DS Brain Training. Nintendo in particular is trumpeting it lately. But we’ve also seen it pop up in the birth of the vast populations of MMOGs in Asia. In 6 years, one enterprising young man has gone from founding a small start up to become the second richest man in China.

You begin to see these surreal numbers tossed around. Over a billion dollars earned by the Sims. The portable gaming market is another billion a year market. A large-scale MMOG will earn upwards of a billion dollars over its life span. This is what happens when you start targeting billions of potential users instead of the same old 52 million.

Some people have figured it out. They’ve made a major shift within their organizations. They are not engaging in market optimization activities like the rest of us. Instead, they are actively pursuing market formation activities.

A five step process for moving beyond the gaming geek cultureHere are a few simple steps that any part of the game development community can take in order to start forming new markets and expanding the industry.

Step 1: Stop fixating on the current game market

Step 2: Stop listening to your gut

Step 3: Learn about product design

Step 4: Surround yourself with other perspectives

Step 5: Build an integrated business plan

Again, this isn’t for everyone, just those people who are interested in pursuing the biggest group of opportunities that our infant game industry has ever known. The rest are very welcome continue with their rarified discussions on how to make a better FPS. :-)

Step 1: Stop fixating on the current game marketWe all have a favorite game. In our dream world, we would spend our days making the ultimate version of that game. The dreams are laced with the kudos we would get from our gamer friends. Not surprisingly, for 90% of the game developers I’ve talked to, their dream game is a clone and serves the existing game market. We need to stop lusting over the thought of creating a better Mario Kart, a better Doom, or a better RPG.

Instead, look beyond the current demographics singularity for people who are not being served by the current game market. It is okay to make a great game for people who are not part of our tribe.

Step 2: Stop listening to your gut. If you happen to have an INTJ or ISTJ Meyer-Briggs profile, you need to stop listening to what your ‘gut’ tells you is a good game. If you happen to love FPS, Platformers, and anything involving WWII violence, put an ice pick through the part of your brain that digs these clone monsters.

Admitting to yourself that you don’t instinctively possess the magic answers to all the game design problems is the first step towards starting to truly listen to your target audience.

Step 3: Learn about product designProduct design is a fascinating, successful field practiced by almost every consumer industry except game development. It deals with creating products for a vast and ever shifting spectrum of customers and seeks to meet needs that they may not even have expressed. Here are some really great aspects about it that are lacking from the current field called ‘game design.’

Product design is an established, highly successful field. There is a lot of depth to tap into in the product design field. There are books that contain validated results, not theories. There are thousands of published case studies. In comparison, the game design field is composed primarily of wandering sages-for-hire and overly dramatic blogs like this one. :-) If our goal is to learn a new perspective, having a rich guide is helpful.

Product design has techniques for identifying needs: Once you stop listening to your gut, you still need a body of knowledge to inform your design decisions. Customer observation, ideation tools, rapid prototyping, on staff customers and others methods can be invaluable.

Product design has techniques for mitigating risk / improving creativity: In particular, the stage-gate product development process allows smart decisions to be made at the appropriate times with the appropriate amount of resources at stake.

To get the most out of a product design philosophy, you need to accept the assumption that games are software products that serve real market needs. This is a bit different than the perspective that games are primarily “an artistically expressive entertainment experience.” Each philosophy has its place, but if you are interested in market formation, I highly recommend sticking with the product design viewpoint. It allows you to tap into existing tools and drive toward concrete results in a pragmatic fashion.

Ultimately, product design has one fundamental lesson to share. A game designer must make games for their customer, not for themselves or for their preferred tribe. There is an objectivity and professionalism that comes with this perspective that keeps us honest. Market orientation is remarkably satisfying if you can pull it off.

Step 4: Surround yourself with other perspectivesA typical product design team has people from all walks of life. Engineers, artists, psychologists, men, and women partake in the cross functional design meetings. We can’t all be Leonardo da Vinci (though we should all strive to be.) However, we can certainly build teams that have a mass of experience across a wide spectrum of talents.

This means actively bringing women onto the team. It means bringing in people from different races and cultures. It means actively recruiting non-traditional skill sets from the cognitive sciences and art fields. Even if they know nothing about game development, their perspective into customer behavior is still incredibly valuable. They can always learn.

As a side note, most of what current designers do is not rocket science. In our egotism, we often fail to realize that our mystical powers of game mastery differ only mildly from the highly refined tastes of a Star Trek geek. When you move outside of the very narrow market segment that celebrates the high art of chain mail pasties, you’ll find that smart people from other fields may make even better game designers.

Here is an imponderable. Are Will Wright’s design skills universally unique, or are they seen as unique simply because he happens to be surrounded by the rest of the highly homogenous game development community?

Step 5: Build an integrated business planMarket building requires you to think through a lot of activities that previously you took for granted or simply followed a formula. You often cannot rely on standard retail channels or marketing channels. The status of your relationship with Marie Claire magazine is something that rarely comes up when marketing Doom, but it may be critical to the success of your dress making shop simulation.

You need to build a business plan that demonstrates the entire chain of activities that will make your product profitable. The product must support the business and all aspects of the business must be intimately integrated with the core customer benefits that support the product.

This is quite different than the loosely coupled system we have now. The publishers make strong suggestions based on historical data and then the developers attempt to build their dream game within what they see primarily as a set of arbitrary and often harmful constraints. Often each group sits in a different silo and barely communicates.

The customer-centric approach puts both marketing and development on the same cross functional team. The same team exists to shepherd the product through from conception to market launch. Responsibilities shift, but there is no ‘tossing’ the product over the fence. Everyone on the team is equally responsible for the product’s final business success.

This works because there is a single common goal “make profit by serving the customer.” This is much more workable than managing a set of cultural assumptions and dreams.

A philosophical shiftWhat I’m describing here is a process and philosophy. It isn’t an answer, but a method of getting to an answer.

I’m not going to point out a specific market opportunity for you. In reality there is not one big market, but thousands of potential markets. By listening, observing and putting aside our subconscious biases and cultural assumptions, we can discover the underlying needs of new customers and begin to serve these markets. This process is more about market discovery and building than it is about market exploitation.

A shift in priorities occurs when you pursue a customer oriented market expansion strategy. Your biggest focus is no longer “Will this new rendering engine work” or “Will these graphics be seen as the best”. Instead you are constantly asking “Does this product meet and exceed the needs of my customer?” The tactical, technical details that are so often the primary focus of our industry are sublimated into the broader concept of making the correct product.

Now you get some interesting decisions that result from this perspective change. You have the opportunity to hire another person for the team. You can hire another programmer to improve your effects system or you could hire a cultural anthropologist to help you gain a better understanding of the target audience needs.

In a market formation situation, if you don’t understand your customer needs, you will fail. The cultural anthropologist becomes a far superior hire from both a business and quality perspective.

ConclusionThis essay is asking the game development community to do something that it historically has almost never done: Make games for people who are different than you.

My hope has been to point out the following:

There exists a self-reinforcing cultural bias within all systems of the game industry that limits our definition of the target market for games.

There exists a larger market outside of our current market that can be highly profitable if they are served with well designed products.

By increasing our self awareness and following product design methodologies using broadly cross functional teams, we can serve these new markets.

There are plenty of people who are happy with the current state of the industry and will defend their lifestyle choice to the grave. They drank the Cool-aid. They dressed up for the Star Trek convention. They beat Ninja Gaiden on hard. They love making games for the current gaming audience.

Many will actively attempt to discredit or dismiss attempts to create new genres. When opportunities arise to spread games into new areas, they intentionally or unintentionally will sabotage the results and try to turn them into games just like any other. They are not being spiteful. They are merely trying to do what they feel is right and enhance the culture they grew up with.

Who really wants to work in an industry where lavender is an acceptable color and shoe shopping an acceptable pastime? Ask your workmates if that is what they want to do with their lives. Eew, yuck, change it to blue! Chances are that you are part of this group. I am.

Cultural change is hard. We often make choices in life because of our implicit value system. Rarely do we ever question that value system or actively seek to change it.

There is, however, a big fat carrot awaiting the few who can make the transition to thinking about customers. It involves obscene profits and legendary status as one of the industry’s early innovators. Yes, there are still slots open in the game developer hall of fame.

The game industry is still young and has enormous room to grow. Stop looking at only your little corner with the assumption that it is the limit of the entire universe. Start listening, observing and imagining how your art can serve others. It is a life worth living.

Wednesday, November 2, 2005

Here’s a phrase from an earlier post that harkens back to the ancient days when game developers beat their dinner dead with bone weapons. “The best game designers are also programmers.” (Apologies to Dylan Fitterer for taking this out of context.)

In the distant past, only a programmer could make a game. You could fumble through the tasks typically done by an artist, a game designer or a sound guy. All game designs from this era were created by programmers often for programmers. Most involve shooting or killing things and the industry bears the cultural bias of our founders to this very day.

In under funded teams where there are one or two people involved, you still need the programmer-designer. For the clone-tastic fringe of indie game development, someone who is a renaissance talent with skills in programming, design, and illustration is essential. Most modern teams however, have grown beyond this limited and restrictive state of creativity expression and they are better for it.

Modern game design is a specialized discipline that rarely correlates with a particular technical profession. Imagine the absurdity of the following statements.

The best authors are also be typesetters

The best directors are also camera men

The best product designers are also engineers

We have outgrown the need for all game designers to be programmers.The liberal arts game designerThe best game designers certainly possess a passing understanding of the materials of their medium. This includes a knowledge of art, programming and sound. But it by no means suggests that in order to be a great designer you must also be a great programmer.

Instead, game design has emerged as its own distinct discipline. A modern game designer should be someone who understands risk / reward systems, prototyping dynamics, human psychology and basic market dynamics. They should understand the process and practice of game design. They need familiarity, but not stunning expertise in other areas of the game creation process. They need to be able to communicate with people who possess specialized technical skills. The result is that designer works as part of cross functional team.

Here’s a quote from Shigeru Miyamoto about how he designed Super Mario Bros:

It started with a simple idea. I thought: "I wonder what it would be like to have a character that bounces around. And the background should be a clear, blue sky." I took that idea to a programmer, and we started working on it.

Mario ended up being too big, so we shrank him. Then we thought, "What if he can grow and shrink? How would he do that? It would have to be a magic mushroom! Where would a mushroom grow? In a forest." We thought of giving Mario a girlfriend, and then we started talking about Alice in Wonderland.

Here is one of the greatest designers of our industry, working hand in hand with a programmer to bring his vision into reality. He focuses on the core game mechanics, the setting and how the prototype evolves. The programmer focuses on creating the prototype, rapidly implementing new features and communicating technical constraints with the designer.

This setup augments the natural talents of both team members. The result is a product with great game design and great programming. You avoid creating a game that is restricted to the often limited talent palette of a single individual.

The innovation explosion that comes from tapping non-technical creatorsIn most forms of new media, we go through a period of time where an intimate understanding of technology is critical to the successful completion of the creative process. Early book authoring required the mastery of print making. Early movie auteurs built custom cameras from scratch. Photographers developed their own film for decades.

With time, tools and team structures emerge that do away with the need for such jacks of all trades. Printers would turn an author’s raw manuscript into a finished book. Movie makers created the position of Director, Script Writer, and Camera man so that people with inherent skills could focus on what they did best. Most photographers eventually discovered that a digital camera and a print lab let them focus more fully on the creative aspects of their art.

Specialization results in increased efficiencies and also impressively improved creativity. The unique voices of people that possess creative skills, but not technical skills are unleashed. In books alone, we would have lost 99% of all modern literature if typesetting was a hard prerequisite for writing a novel.

Games are going through the same maturation process as other industries. Ultimately, by tapping into non-technical game designers, we can increase the talent pool of visionaries by a hundred fold.

The dark side of a programmer worshipping game design culture Old habits still linger and not everyone has adapted to the new world of true cross functional game development. If your bias is that your game designers to be programmers and you work in a team larger than one person, you are doing your game a grave disservice.

You eliminate out of hand talented individuals who are quite likely better suited for the position. If you look around, you may find artists with the correct skill set skill set. You may find programmers or writers. If you look even more broadly, you may find psychologists or housewives.

Any cultural bias towards promoting programmers to game design positions is the equivalent of promoting only white men to positions of decision making authority. At the very least, this practice is morally repugnant.

The limits of programmer designAt the worst, game designs created by programmers tend to focus on a very limited spectrum of human experience. They involve spatial skills, not social skills. They involve risk mechanics focused on extreme die and repeat-style punishment, not exploration or discovery. This is a generalization to be certain, but one that is not far off from reality.

By selecting game designers that are programmers, we let our incestuous history determine the creativity of our future. We build iteratively on the limited seeds of past efforts and create games for programmers and people who think like programmers. The result is more Doom 4 and less Nintendogs.

If you really want to contribute to the growth of our art form, build a team that doesn’t have a programmer as the main designer. Think of it as affirmative action for the game industry. Be sure that they know the craft and techniques of game design. Be sure that they can talk the language of the people on their team. But never make elite technical skills a prerequisite for a game design position.

I dream of seeing an explosion of vibrant game designs that expand our industry. This will only come about by putting people who are not traditional, technology-worshipping game developers in positions of great creative power.

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About Me

I've been a game designer, pixel artist, toolmaker, physicist and MBA. My first job in college was on a game called Tyrian at a tiny company called Epic Megagames. These days, I'm the Chief Creative Officer at Spry Fox.